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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

bbbuck - 11:52am Dec 16, 2002 EST (# 6755 of 6762)
"You can't eat this, it's people, it's people"-B....."What about the cherry pie?"

Boy 20 posts of looneychick spam.
Is she going somewhere during the Christmas holidays and giving it a Christmas break?
I'd answer your question almarst2002 but I can't understand you.
kalter.rauch what's the status on the anti-looneychic/rshow55spam campaign?

commondata - 12:09pm Dec 16, 2002 EST (# 6756 of 6762)

rshow55 12/16/02 11:14am - I made an analogy between fighting and defecation a while back, and commondata objected to it.

I'm not sure that it was the analogy I was objecting to so much as the US's 5 decades of dysentery and it's failure to seek medical help in the international community. Setting aside international law for a bit of renogiation over exception handling was another idea I strongly objected to. By the way, there are 370,000 deaths from dysentery that occur worldwide each year in children under the age of five. Now if we were rationalising and prioritising the expenditure of a trillion dollars...

rshow55 - 12:09pm Dec 16, 2002 EST (# 6757 of 6762)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

We're both deluded. We think that, with talking, the odds of killing go down - and the odds of good cooperation go up - and we think that we're shifting those odds in favorable directions enough to be worth our trouble. My guess is that, in an actuarial sense, we may be doing enough to cut the probability of death in the world by something like 1000 lives/hour we work.

The judgement's one of Bayesian probabilities - - a lot of philosophical discussion has occurred since the Humian standard set out in

Iraq Makes a Philosophically Flawed Effort to Disprove a Negative By EMILY EAKIN http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/weekinreview/15EAKI.html and discussed in 6685-86 rshow55 12/15/02 8:02pm

A subject I'll return to.

rshow55 - 12:10pm Dec 16, 2002 EST (# 6758 of 6762)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

commondata 12/16/02 12:09pm - - we agree about a lot in the area of priorities. We disagree about the renegotiation.

mazza9 - 03:56pm Dec 16, 2002 EST (# 6759 of 6762)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Alarmst:

Here's another story about a pilot who fought in the war.

One of my fellow congregation members is a retired kindergarten teacher. As with any teacher she travels in the summer time with her husband, (he's a teacher too!) to broaden her knowledge base, and more importantly help her fellow man, (her cuurent efforts are directed to raising funds to help the war ravaged people of Sierra Leone!)

In the early 80s she and her husband traveled to Japan to visit a Lutheran Church that was bringing the word of Christ to that country. One evening she attended a bible study at the home of a Mr. Fuchida. Does the the name ring a bell? Mr. Fuchida commanded the Pearl Harbour raid. He had survived the war and found Christ through the intervention of one of the Tokyo Raiders who were highlighted in the Lawson Book/Movie "30 Seconds Over Tokyo". It seems that Mr Fuchida, when he heard of the treatment of the captured raiders, (rent the movie or read the book), he sought out one of the survivors and established a life long friendship which transecended the war and "enemy" mentality.

You use history to measure yourself for greatness. You say, "I'm better then Harry Truman because I wouldn't have "dropped the bomb"! Moral superiority is not gained that way. Senator Bob Dole grips that pencil to mask the injury that he sustained in the war. He doesn't wallow as you do in the suffering of war. He moves on.

My church friend is a part of the State Department's People to People program. Two year's ago she visited Iran. While there she met with part of an Armenian family that still lives there. Other members of that family were sponsored in the US by our church. She was just acting as the "happy messenger" of good tydings!

The world is improved one step at a time, not by the perfect ones, (YOU?) but by the ordinary people who perform extraordinary service for their fellow man.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense